James Watson

James Watson was born on 6 April 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, and died on 6 November 2025 in East Northport, New York. He entered the University of Chicago at fifteen, graduated in 1947, and earned a PhD from Indiana University in 1950. After research in Copenhagen turned his interest to DNA, he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge in 1951, where he worked with Francis Crick on the problem of its molecular structure; using X-ray diffraction evidence that reached them through Rosalind Franklin's colleague Maurice Wilkins, detailed on this atlas's own Photograph 51 entry, Watson and Crick published their double helix model in Nature in April 1953. He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Crick and Wilkins. Watson taught at Harvard from 1955 to 1976, then led the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 1968, building it into a major center for molecular biology and cancer research, and helped direct the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health from 1988 to 1992. In January 2019, after further public remarks linking race and intelligence, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory stripped him of his remaining honorary titles, stating that his comments reversed a written apology and retraction he had given for substantially the same claim in 2007.